


A Certain Smile

by sensiblecat



Series: Emotional Baggage [7]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-27
Updated: 2008-06-27
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:49:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sensiblecat/pseuds/sensiblecat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set immediately after <i>Turn Left</i> in the 2008 series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Certain Smile

CREDITS: Excerpts from the script by Russell T Davies (italicized), used without permission. No commercial profit intended  
Quotation from "The Return of The King" by JRR Tolkien.  
Thank you to the DW Transcripts site for the quotes.

 _“I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.”_

 _  
**Frodo on Mount Doom – “The Return of the King” by JR Tolkien**   
_

Companions were all the same, the Doctor reflected. Sooner or later, they all wandered off and got into some kind of trouble.

Even Donna Noble.

His mild irritation wasn’t yet enough to pierce his general sense of carefree good humour. He loved places like this – markets, local colour, the weird, wonderful and exotic. Hadn’t felt so relaxed since – well, no need to go over all that again.

The thing that had hit him hardest about the incident on Midnight, when he’d begun to recover from his quite uncharacteristic panic, was the ironic banality of it all. That he, veteran of a thousand battles against the giants of the Universe, and something of a giant in his own right if he was honest, should end up dying like that – pushed out of an airlock because somebody thought his face didn’t quite fit. He’d kept on worrying at that, rubbing up against it like a fibre of meat caught between his front teeth. Not fitting in had never been a problem of his before. Well, hardly ever. Not usually. He’d made something of a career out of it – being unusual was so normal for him that he couldn’t remember how to be normal if, for some strange reason, he wanted to be.

Besides, what template would he conform to? No point trying to be a normal human when he wasn’t human anyway. And he’d never taken to mainstream social behaviour back home. He was a character on the edges, seeing how close he could creep in before he blew his cover as an observer. How far he could push it before someone spotted him and the fun really began, how involved he could become without closing off the exit route of denying everything. And he’d rather thought it came as second nature to him, that he’d got it off to a fine art after centuries of practice.

But after Midnight, that reassuring picture of himself was looking a little frayed around the edges. Oh well. He’d get over it, given time. Nothing to worry about – just a blip. An unfortunate incident he’d rather forget. Wasn’t as if he was going to pack it all in, his perfect life, and settle down. Mortgage. Carpets and doors.

You could sing that to “Baubles, Bangles and Beads”, couldn’t you? There were certainly plenty of those lying around in this oriental bazaar. No wonder Donna had disappeared; the place was a paradise for a shopaholic like her. He sort of wondered whether to pick up some little trinket for her, but he could hear her indignant, “Is that what you think of me, Space Man?” and he replaced the bracelet he’d idly picked up, moving on rapidly before the vendor could catch his eye and begin to haggle.

Nope, Donna wasn’t the trinkets type. Wasn’t even the shopping type, to be honest, though they joked about it. Now Rose, she could spend two days looking for the perfect gift at the perfect price. Choosing the exact bottle of bazoolium to offer Jackie had taken a whole afternoon. Why hadn’t he minded more at the time?

He squinted up at the sky – well, what you could see of it. The second sun of the day was no longer visible in the strip between the towering pagodas, which meant it was getting on for teatime. Donna really had been gone an awfully long time. He’d expected her to show up, moaning about her feet killing her, a couple of hours ago. How many times had he been up and down this alleyway now? Three, four?

Companions! Didn’t matter how many times you told them, they just had to keep wandering off, didn’t they?

Okay, now he was just a teensy weensy bit more than just irritated. Not exactly worried but definitely…oh, all right, yeah, kind of worried. Ish.

He wasn’t liking this now. Not one bit. He moved quickly to the vendor who’d tried to sell them Shukina – how long ago, was it? Long ago for him to be packing up his stall now; the Doctor’s trainers squelched through rotting fruit, squirting juice. The light was going and if he was less edgy the sizzle of fat and the aroma of the nearby kebab stalls would be making his mouth water. It really was time to find Donna and have something to eat.

“’Scuse me,” he began.

Automatically, the vendor launched into his patter. “You like to buy peshwami? Most beautiful peshwami in all Shen Shan – I sell you cheap, look, three…four-”

“No thanks,” he said quickly. “That friend I was with before – you know, the one with red hair – you wouldn’t happen to know where she’s gone, would you?”

The vendor turned aside and shouted to his wife in the local dialect – she replied, louder and faster. To the Doctor’s slight relief, he nodded.

“She say she go have fortune told.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes. Might have known Donna would fall for that line. She even believed in horoscopes, though he’d frequently pointed out the difficulties with trying to divide a species into twelve groups neatly classified by the constellations that happened to be visible in the night sky at the time.

“Sod logic!” she’d yelled at him, hands on hips. “If I wanna believe it, I’ll believe it. Plenty of people don’t believe in _you_ , Martian Boy!”

He was beginning to miss her.

The Shan Shen woman shook her head gravely. “Is bad woman. Very bad. Give you bad dreams. She offer her free reading because her hair is strange.”

“She wants strange hair, does she? Wait until she claps eyes on me! You wouldn’t happen to know where this fortune teller hangs out, would you?” the Doctor asked.

There was the inevitable pause. He reached into his pocket and laid a few tongue-loosening coins in the palm of her hand. Silently, she pointed to a nearby booth.

The smell of incense hit him, making his eyes water as he parted the hanging strings of beads and he was about to make some throwaway remark about how you could travel the length and breadth of time and space, yet one of the constants was the décor in a cheap palm-reader’s cubby hole. Then he saw Donna, and more importantly she saw him.

She leapt up and hurled herself into his arms as if she’d been away for years. He could smell the sweat of fear on her skin. He was gonna have words with this chartalan for creeping his best mate out like this. Blimey, she was physically shaking. Blinking woman had taken her money and then not even had the decency to hang around and see if she was okay.

“Everything all right?” he asked, brightly. He knew she wasn’t. Not even Time Lord all right.

“Oh God!” was all she could say, threatening to crush his primary respiratory system with the force of her pincher hug.

“What was that for?” he laughed. His temporary panic was settling down and he was already wondering which exotic restaurant they’d choose for dinner tonight.

“I don’t know,” she stammered, half-laughing herself.

He pulled back a little, smiling; then his smile died a bit when he saw the fear still lurking in her eyes.

“That’ll teach you to wander off, won’t it?” he scolded, mildly.

Suddenly he was distracted by a skittering sound from the table in a murky corner. He turned round and spotted a huge scarab beetle lying on its back, apparently in its death throes.

“That thing was _on_ me,” said Donna.

“What?”

“It was on my back.”

“Oh, come on,” he humoured her. “What juju juice did she give you to put ideas like that in your head?”

“Well, if it wasn’t there, what’s it doin’ here now?” she demanded. “Not exactly gonna encourage the customers, is it?”

He moved away and squatted by the table to take a closer look. The thing was clearly as good as dead, which was probably just as well, since it oozed temporal distortion and malevolence, and was, he suspected, even more likely to give him a headache than the sickly smell in this place.

“Hmm,” he murmured, and reached for the sonic. Reflecting on the creature’s state, he thought better of that and put out a hand. “Might take a look at this beastie. Pass me a stick, would you?”

“Can’t you leave _anything_ alone?” she complained. “All I want to do is get out of here as quick as I can.”

“We could take it with us,” he proposed.

“No!”

The horror in her tone of voice made him look up sharply.

“What happened to you?” he asked, his anxiety returning. For the first time, he began to suspect something more sinister than the cheap voodoo he’d been assuming.  
 _  
“I had…._ ” She paused, blinked, rubbed her head. “ _I can’t remember properly. Sort of a dream, only it wasn’t – you know how stuff gets all muddled up…I can't remember. It's slipping away. You know like when you try and think of a dream and it just sort of... goes?”  
_  
With a slight reluctance, he temporarily abandoned the beetle to its fate and came and sat beside her. He closed his fingers around her trembling wrist and massaged her shoulders with his other arm. “This dream you had. What happened?”

“I turned right instead of left.” She banged her head. “Or was it left instead of right? I went the wrong way and everything changed. That’s what. The whole world just changed around me, cos I didn’t meet you. And you…”

“It’s only a dream,” he soothed her, and himself to some extent. “You can tell me. None of it exists any more.” He was contradicting himself, he realised – if it was only a dream it never had existed, had it? But the human vocabulary for these things was very imprecise by the standards he’d grown up with.

“But you were _dead_ ,” she said. Put like that, he had to admit it didn’t sound very good. “You died on your own – you couldn’t stop and it was my fault.”

“What was? You mustn’t go blaming yourself for every little silly thing that happens, you know.”

“ _That_ was silly?” she exclaimed. “I saw your body, covered up on a stretcher. They said…oh, it’s all getting muddled up. And she was too late. God, her face when they told her – she was devastated…”

“Who was too late?”

“The woman. I can’t even remember her name. No, hang on. She didn’t have a name. Or if she did, she never told me. She just stood there, with her eyes staring, and I could tell she was really…later on she said she’d come from…oh, it’s no good. It’s all mixed up in my head.”

“Tell me about this time you took the wrong turning,” he prompted, a theory beginning to form in his mind. It sounded like the classic node of temporal intersection. Schoolboy stuff. Well, schoolboy if you were a Time Lord. He’d done page after page of those things. One seemingly tiny decision rippling out into a timeline that changed the world, or even the universe. A decision that could be reversed, illegally in most cases, but sometimes it was worth the risk involved.

So she told him. The junction, sitting in the car, her mother going on at her. Blimey, he used to think Jackie Tyler had a mouth on her but at least she stood up for her own flesh and blood. Donna’s mother seemed to make it her mission in life to pull her down. That cruel jibe about businessmen wanting temps for practice. Oh, didn’t he just love them – these women of the world who thought a bit of chipped nail varnish was a disaster? Really, he was going to find it difficult not to be rude to Sylvia Noble if they ever met again.

Then Donna mentioned HC Clements, and his blood ran cold. The implication was clear. One road led her to him, and one did not. And somebody wanted to make sure she took the second route.

No Donna. Nobody to tell him when to stop. Somehow, that had led to him dying. Really dying. Maybe even wanting to die. You could will your body to reject regeneration – the last time he’d seen one of his people do that was, of course, etched into his memory. And if he said he’d never contemplated doing that – well, he’d be telling porky-pies. He’d stared into that pit for months on end, not all that long ago. Even Martha couldn’t pull him out of it.

From Donna’s scrappy memories he began to build up a picture of a nightmare world. A world he’d abandoned in his own despair. But surely there was someone else, someone who could save them? What about Jack? Sarah Jane? Martha Jones? And wouldn’t someone on the Titanic – Astrid, maybe – have realised what was about to happen and managed to prevent it? His hearts lurched. He’d come within inches – literally – of not preventing it himself. He’d been close enough to the Queen to see the colour of the slippers she was wearing.

And she’d waved to him. Thanked him. Her Majesty – how about that? It had never crossed the old dear’s mind for a minute that he’d fail. No pressure there, then. Of course, it wasn’t as if he was the only one around who could save the Earth. If he decided to pack it in there’d be someone else around to take over – wouldn’t there?

Wouldn’t there?

If that question had an easy answer, he’d be living an easy life. It hadn’t, and he wasn’t.

“And she was the only one who got it,” Donna said. “This woman. Kept just popping up out of nowhere, nudging me so I didn’t get myself killed, but then she said I’d have to die. I’d have to die to set things right.”

“So much for you being _the most ordinary person in the whole of creation_ ,” he observed, trying to lighten the tone a little.

“That’s what she said. Well, almost.” And he watched her smile at the memory. His heart warmed at the thought of the unknown friend who’d seen her potential. “ _Said I was the most important person in creation. ‘It just took the Doctor to show you that, simply by being with him._ ’” She nodded. “That’s what she said. It was like she…”

“ _Go on_ ,” he said. His voice was trembling a bit; he wasn’t sure why. Or maybe he knew and he wasn’t ready to deal with it.

Donna shoved her hands between her knees and giggled awkwardly. “I wondered if her and you…Oh, never mind.”

“Nope.” Relieved, he turned his attention to the inverted, and now very dead, beetle. He needed something interesting to concentrate on and it fitted the bill nicely. _“It just got lucky, this thing. It's one of the Trickster's Brigade. Changes a life in tiny little ways. Most times, the universe just compensates around it, but with you...”_ He was almost proud of her. _“Great big parallel world!_ ”

She basked briefly in his approval. Once more, he wanted to line up all the people who’d ever stamped on that beautiful spirit of hers, starting with her mother, and strangle them one by one. “H _old on, you said parallel worlds are sealed off,_ ” she protested.

“ _They are_.” He moved on quickly from the picture of a blank white wall in his memories.  
“ _They are_ ,” he repeated. “ _But you had one created around you. Funny thing is, it seems to be happening a lot. To you._ ”

No, it wasn’t a dream. Any more than her time as a saved file in the library computer had been a dream. They were talking alternate realities here. His mind was streaming through possibilities so rapidly that it almost took his breath away. Good ones, bad ones, terrifying ones. He was missing something. Something right in front of him, something that would complete the picture. And he remembered saying something like that to Martha once and the look she’d rewarded him with.

Donna was running on and he was running on in return, babbling about his growing awareness of something unique about her, a pattern he’d sensed for longer than he could recall, but only just seemed to have discovered.

“ _It’s like something’s binding us together,_ ” he remarked. Not a very profound way of putting it, to be honest, but he needed to think and it bought him a little time.

Of course, she was having none of it. That was Donna for you. “ _Don’t be so daft. I’m nothing special_ ,” she retorted.

But he caught the volley; there wasn’t time to lob it back and play games with her. This was getting serious. As was his affection for her – at least, whatever it was that made her so special, so unique, so brilliant, so….Donna.

“ _Yes you are,_ ” he replied, smiling fondly. “ _You’re brilliant_.”

“ _That’s what she said_.”

Oh no. No, no, no, no _no_ …

She smiled again. Then he knew who that woman had been. That was the way he used to smile.

His own world cracked open at that moment. Hope came bursting up from the chasm of his grief like lava from a barely dormant volcano and he realised what he’d gone to the end of the universe to deny – how little he’d been living since he’d lost her.

Funny thing was, none of that devalued Donna in the slightest. The reverse, in fact.

“ _She said that_ ,” Donna was repeating. He hardly registered it.

“Who did?”

But he knew the answer. There was something about Rose Tyler’s smile that set it apart from others. Even its reflected glory could outshine a supernova. Even as he denied her existence, he felt walls crumble between the worlds and understood the glory and the danger he’d been missing. The more restrained he schooled his voice to be, the more it burned within him – and by the time her confirmation came, he could feel those two words flashing on and off in his head. Two words, scattered through time and space. Worlds shattered. Broken hearts made whole.

Beyond whatever horror lay ahead, he sensed her calling and he vowed that nothing would part them again.

 _Rose was coming back._

 _That was good, wasn’t it?_

 _Yeah._

Yet when he saw the TARDIS bathed in red and heard the Cloister Bell for the first time since the Master’s reign of terror, it was Donna’s hand he clung to.

That was good as well. He was glad to have her here with him. "Here at the end of all things, Sam".


End file.
